Buenas tardes!
End of our second week at the Centro Linguistico Internacional in Antigua. Our language skills are definetely improving. We can now converse in Spanish in most simple situations - albeit slowly. 'Mas despacio, por favor' (more slowly, please) is our most useful phrase.

Unfortunately we have found ouselves in some complicated situations this week e.g. 'we seem to have a nest of biting termites living in our bedroom window frame, please can you exterminate them?'

Also, yesterday we went on an activity which we thought was a visit to the hot springs, but turned out to be a demonstration of Mayan traditional handicrafts. It was OK but lasted 2 hours, narrated in Spanish. It wasn't the most interesting afternoon we've had - but marginally better than the visit to the jade factory which we thought was going to be a modern art museum. No more activities until we have enough Spanish to find out exactly what these activities involve.

We did have our first experience of a chicken bus, though. These are decommissioned US school buses, painted bright colours and fitted out with speakers. They are called chicken buses because you can bring anything on them as long as it fits - backpacks, food, animals, mattresses etc. They're suprisingly comfortable but desembarking from the back door requires assistance if you are over 25.

Its our first wedding anniversary today, so to celebrate, we're going out to a Lebanese restaurant tonight (providing we can find it again). Whenever we've walked past, we've seen customers inside smoking these big hookahs and looking very relaxed. I'm sure they aren't smoking anything remotely narcotic...but there's always hope.

Volcano climbing on Sunday, although I'm considering pony assistance on the way up, at least.
Have a great weekend,
J XX